On a similar note, see also Doggerland (the large, submerged peninsula off the north-west coast of Europe, of which the British Isles are the only surviving above-surface relics today):
A lot of previously-inhabited territory -- presumably fertile lowlands! -- was inundated as sea levels rose after the last ice age ended, around 9500-8500 years ago.
There are a lot of geolocations in that area where you can still walk out onto sandbars during low tide. In this map, much of the green zone around Denmark is seasonally 'land'.
Ye auld name for that peninsula, "Jutland", implicates inasmuch.
For example, Australian Aborigines still have stories about the huge, man-eating lizards. It was considered just a standard myth until we discovered fossils of Megalania, a huge lizard matching the description, that went extinct soon after humans came to Australia.
Closer to the actual sea level rise topic, tribes of coastal northern Australia still have names and relatively precise description of land features (mountains etc) that are now underwater, but were land until 9k years ago.
I've done some diving in the Black Sea and have stumbled upon a number of structures that looked like human-made artifacts. They are near the shore lines as they were before the end of the last glacial period. I'm personally 99% sure there was a somewhat advanced civilization at that time.
Look up Black Sea deluge theory. Black sea was supposedly flooded (a bit later than the actual sea level rise from the ice melting after the ice age), around 7500 years ago, with levels rising up to 70m and turning it from a freshwater lake into Black Sea, and increasing its size 1.5x-2x.
That event is one of possible explanations for the spread of what became Indo-European language/culture/people group, which a good deal of us belong to.
Until the evidence for the Black Sea deluge was found, the Indo-Europeans were theoreticized to have come from area north of Black Sea (it is still so), but I think the initial push came from the now flooded areas.
Look up Black Sea deluge theory. Black sea was supposedly flooded (a bit later than the actual sea level rise from the ice melting after the ice age), around 7500 years ago, with levels rising up to 70m and turning it from a freshwater lake into Black Sea, and increasing its size 1.5x-2x.
That event is one of possible explanations for the spread of what became Indo-European language/culture/people group, which a good deal of us belong to.
Until the evidence for the Black Sea deluge was found, the Indo-Europeans were theoreticized to have come from area north of Black Sea (it is still so), but I think the initial push came from the now flooded areas.
How sure were you that the things you saw were man-made? If I thought I'd discovered a 10,000 year old object, it would be worth notifying an archeologist.
The Black Sea is aquatically contiguous with the Mediterranean, so it is safe to say that there was a spanning civilization in that climate zone, after humanity migrated north of the Sahara.
Some of the metals and ceramics found in these sites are more detailed than modern day equivalents, because there was an abundance of exquisite raw materials. There is not any blatant evidence to show advanced means of manufacture, or technology hence.
I didn't see any discussion of this in the article, but could it have just fallen off a ship, maybe from the Romans or something? It looks like the only dating they've done so far is of the area it was found in, not the monolith itself.
Don't get too excited. From the sound of it, it could be an artefact, those could be harbour walls, but they could also be looking at some nice old karst that happens to have weathered into rectilinear shapes.
They're not regular, from the paper, they're holes. You get holes in rocks for all sorts of reasons, from biogenic processes through to inclusions of softer or soluble rock.
Just saying that at this stage it's all quite light on evidence.
It's the standard dating scheme used in archaeology and some areas of geology for material that is carbon dated. As mentioned on the wikipedia page that OP linked to, "present" is actually a standard date: January 1, 1950; chosen because material from later dates can not be reliably measured [using carbon dating] due to nuclear testing.
No that is when radioactive forms of carbon start to push us into a different situation with regards to radiocarbon dating. It is basically pre nuclear weapons and post now.
what about BCE (as in "Before Common Era"), i thought this was the pc way of expressing this in our post-religious world of tomorrow!? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_era
> "present" is actually a standard date: January 1, 1950
which is an abuse of the English langauge, since "present" actually means "now." Scientists should not overload pre-existing English words to mean other things.
I would state the argument as follows: We should use the term "before nuclear testing", abbreviated as BNT. It is more precise than "before present", which will become more inaccurate over time, whereas "before nuclear testing" will always have the same meaning.
I assert that any system would be arbitrary, because we can't we can't count years either from the beginning of the universe, from the beginning of the Earth, or the beginning of life, because none of those dates are known with adequate precision. Furthermore we can't use "years since the date this text was written" because that would make reading any such text an absolute chore.
If there isn't an alternative, then complaining that about that arbitrariness is a worthless contribution to this discussion. Do you think that less arbitrary alternatives exist? Forget suggesting an alternative... are there alternatives at all?
I was complaining that it is "yet another time scale," which is not something we need. That it's arbitrary is also true, but not the thrust of the criticism.
I realize it may not have been obvious that that was the thurst of my criticism, but "yet another X" is a common phrase in the hacker community.
Looking at the wikipedia article for "Yet another," the very first sentence is this:
> Among programmers, yet another (often abbreviated ya, Ya or YA in the initial part of an acronym) is an idiomatic qualifier in the name of a computer program, organisation, or event that is confessedly unoriginal.
The point is, there is already a widely used system for dating years. Coming up with a new one adds nothing (except confusion).
Coming up with a new one that also overloads pre-existing English words is even worse.
I agree that it mostly causes unneeded confusion to have another arbitrary standard. I think usually they are created or perpetuated to give a minor convenience to a minority of specialists using it every day, but then they become popular and are constant obstacle for non-specialists. Other examples are the mole, angstrom, electron-volt, decibel and light year.
It looks like the usefulness of BP to specialists is because the carbon dating is done in reference to a sample which was prepared at that time. I don't know why they don't convert to BC or BCE for an article that non-carbon-daters are going to read though.
http://education.nationalgeographic.com/maps/doggerland/
A lot of previously-inhabited territory -- presumably fertile lowlands! -- was inundated as sea levels rose after the last ice age ended, around 9500-8500 years ago.